A Simple yet Effective Network based on Vision Transformer for Camouflaged Object and Salient Object Detection

Camouflaged object detection (COD) and salient object detection (SOD) are two distinct yet closely-related computer vision tasks widely studied during the past decades. Though sharing the same purpose of segmenting an image into binary foreground and background regions, their distinction lies in the fact that COD focuses on concealed objects hidden in the image, while SOD concentrates on the most prominent objects in the image. Previous works achieved good performance by stacking various hand-designed modules and multi-scale features. However, these carefully-designed complex networks often performed well on one task but not on another. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective network (SENet) based on vision Transformer (ViT), by employing a simple design of an asymmetric ViT-based encoder-decoder structure, we yield competitive results on both tasks, exhibiting greater versatility than meticulously crafted ones. Furthermore, to enhance the Transformer's ability to model local information, which is important for pixel-level binary segmentation tasks, we propose a local information capture module (LICM). We also propose a dynamic weighted loss (DW loss) based on Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) and Intersection over Union (IoU) loss, which guides the network to pay more attention to those smaller and more difficult-to-find target objects according to their size. Moreover, we explore the issue of joint training of SOD and COD, and propose a preliminary solution to the conflict in joint training, further improving the performance of SOD. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/linuxsino/SENet.

NSP-BERT: A Prompt-based Zero-Shot Learner Through an Original Pre-training Task--Next Sentence Prediction

Using prompts to utilize language models to perform various downstream tasks, also known as prompt-based learning or prompt-learning, has lately gained significant success in comparison to the pre-train and fine-tune paradigm. Nonetheless, virtually all prompt-based methods are token-level, meaning they all utilize GPT's left-to-right language model or BERT's masked language model to perform cloze-style tasks. In this paper, we attempt to accomplish several NLP tasks in the zero-shot scenario using a BERT original pre-training task abandoned by RoBERTa and other models--Next Sentence Prediction (NSP). Unlike token-level techniques, our sentence-level prompt-based method NSP-BERT does not need to fix the length of the prompt or the position to be predicted, allowing it to handle tasks such as entity linking with ease. Based on the characteristics of NSP-BERT, we offer several quick building templates for various downstream tasks. We suggest a two-stage prompt method for word sense disambiguation tasks in particular. Our strategies for mapping the labels significantly enhance the model's performance on sentence pair tasks. On the FewCLUE benchmark, our NSP-BERT outperforms other zero-shot methods on most of these tasks and comes close to the few-shot methods.